Culture

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Culture

• Culture is the total of knowledge, attitudes, and
  behaviors shared by and passed on by the members
  of a specific group.
• Culture can be divided into folk culture and
  popular culture and can consist of material or
  non-material items.

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Culture

• Material items can be houses, clothing, weapons,
  utensils, or toys.
• Non-material items can be beliefs, folk stories,
  fairytales, and political organization.

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One aspect of culture is non-material culture
such as folk stories and fairy tales. This map
shows the distribution of folk stories in
Switzerland to answer the question where babies
come from.
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Folk Culture

• Folk culture is practiced by small homogenous
  groups that tend to live in rural isolated areas
  and it is extremely resistant to change.
• Some examples of folk culture in the United
  States are the Amish or isolated cultures in the
  Appalachian Mountains.

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Popular Culture

• Popular culture is practiced by the majority of
  people in a society and may spread to other parts
  of the world. Popular culture is spread to
  television, radio, and movies. Some examples of
  popular culture are blue jeans, fast food
  restaurants, and types of music such as rock and
  roll or rb.

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Culture

• Cultures can change over time through
  innovations. An innovation is when a culture
  takes an existing idea or technology and creates
  something new with existing resources. Some
  examples of innovations are the printing press,
  reading and writing, gunpowder, and the moldboard
  plow.

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Cultural Hearths

• A cultural hearth is the site of an innovation
  from which basic ideas, materials, and technology
  diffuse to other cultures. An example of a
  cultural hearth is the fertile crescent where
  reading and writing started. Another example of
  a cultural hearth is the Inca homeland in the
  Andes Mountains where terraced farming began.

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The fertile Crescent and the Nile River valley.
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The Maya cultural hearth in southern Mexico
and Central America.
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Cultural Diffusion

• Culture is spread when an idea interacts with
  persons, objects, or ideas in other regions. Two
  basic types of diffusion are relocation and
  expansion.

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Expansion Diffusion

• Expansion diffusion is further divided into
  hierarchical diffusion, contagious diffusion, and
  stimulus diffusion.

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Hierarchical Diffusion

• The spread of an idea from persons or nodes of
  authority or power to other persons or places.
  It may result from the ideas of political
  leaders, socially elite people, or a place of
  power such as an urban center.

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Diffusion of the printing press in Europe.
Presses were started in large cities and then
spread to rural areas.
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Contagious Diffusion

• The rapid, widespread diffusion of a
  characteristic throughout the population.

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The hearth area of rodeos and map showing
diffusion of rodeos.
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Stimulus Diffusion

• The spread of an underlying principle, even
  though a characteristic itself fails to diffuse.

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Relocation Diffusion

• The spread of an idea through a physical
  movement of people from one place to another.

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Intervening Barriers

• The spread of culture can be stopped by
  intervening barriers. An intervening barrier is
  an obstacle that prevents the spread of culture.
  
• Physical Intervening Barriers - Mountains, Bodies
  of Water, Deserts
• Political Intervening Barriers - A law against
  adopting a certain innovation